Introduction

The ‘Green New Deal’ concept has been widely taken up for envisaging a low-carbon, environmentally sustainable, socially just future and for building alliances which could realize it. Such agendas remain largely efforts towards a deal, that is, an institutional agreement that could be implemented with substantial resources. Hence this chapter will analyse various GND agendas rather than deals per se.

Extending the GND concept, the Climate Justice movement has generated various proposals for a Global GND. These emphasize North–South injustices, their drivers and means to overcome them. Although such proposals remain even more distant from a deal, they sharpen social justice issues for national agendas as well as global ones.

Advocating a Global GND, the UK-based campaign group War on Want has drawn on its long-time role in building solidarity with ‘frontline communities’. Beyond being simply a victim, such communities often confront the forces responsible for resource plunder and degradation. As the campaign has argued, a Global GND is necessary ‘to deliver climate justice, by reordering our economies to protect both people and the planet’. Both face continuous threats from neocolonial extractivism. ‘We must cut emissions fairly, and move away from systems of limitless extraction and exploitation; which line the pockets of corporates and rich shareholders, whilst keeping the majority of the world's population in poverty’ (WoW, 2021). Such proposals highlight North–South socio-economic inequities, which remain ambiguous or obscure in North-based national versions of a GND.

Another version of a Global GND, bringing together legislators worldwide, likewise highlights North–South inequities. In particular, ‘[f] ood and water security are increasingly serious issues that disproportionately impact those in the Global South, exacerbated by an industrial food system that is over reliant on fossil fuels and which contributes significantly to climate change through land clearing’. Hence a Global GND must restructure economies North and South (350.org, 2021). Likewise from a climate justice perspective, a People's GND proposes infrastructural-agricultural transformation in the global North, and a North–South industrial convergence towards overcoming inequities (Ajl, 2021).

Numerous North-based organizations have co-sponsored The Green New Deal for Europe (GNDE). This seeks ‘accountability for Europe's historic role in resource extraction in the Global South’, as a basis for funding frontline communities to deal with colonial legacies as well as climate change.